Clean age kicks Feargal Sharkey's unlikely second act as an activist

The former Undertones frontman was only looking for a retirement hobby. How did he become the face of the fi ght for Britain’s rivers?

- Tim Adams

Time was, people would stop Feargal Sharkey in the street to talk about the song Teenage Kicks. These days, he says, “it’s always about shite in rivers”.

The former Undertones singer, now the vocal frontman for the campaign to highlight the scandal of sewage in Britain’s inland and coastal waters, does not particularly welcome the change. “I’m really happy to get back to talking about gigs and records again as soon as anybody else is ready,” he says. But neither is he about to give up his cause. Particularly now he is winning.

He has known for a couple of years that he has discovered that rare beast: an issue that can unite the whole of the UK. He says: “ There is literally no street anywhere these days I can walk down without someone stopping me and saying: ‘Bloody hell, Feargal, keep going with what you are doing on the rivers ’ ... We put our trust in the system and the system has taken that trust and trashed it. Why should we not be angry about that?”

Recently, that anger found a new focus in the latest toothless “action plan” delivered by the UK environment minister Thérèse Coffey. Sharkey, when I meet him in central London, is at peak flow. “This is the third water plan in six months! Coffey announced … a £1.6bn [$2bn] investment. Does that overturn the £3.1bn her predecessor announced last August? Or the billions Michael Gove announced in 2018? It is,” he says, “just kids in a panic realising too late they are going to get a hammering on this at the local elections, and again grasping at any straw.”